PRSPs have achieved a useful mainstreaming of anti-poverty efforts in national policy processes in Africa. However, the seven country experiences synthesised in this article reveal differences as well as commonalities. Whether or not vicious circles of patrimonial politics, state weakness and ineffectual aid can be replaced with virtuous ones, based on greater national ownership of anti-poverty...

There is a strong, positive, and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. In this paper, we attempt to understand to what extent this relationship is causal. Our approach exploits two changes to British compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp across-cohort differences in educational attainment. Using regression discontinuity methods, we find the reforms did not ...

As phrases like "managed care backlash" become part of the lexicon in American health care policy circles, it is instructive to examine a managed competition experiment in a vastly different context. Britain's Conservative government instituted reforms in 1991 to transform the National Health Service (NHS) from a centrally administered service to managed competition between purchasers and provi...

Previous quantitative assessments of likely impacts of recent reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (in particular the Agenda 2000) differ across empirical studies. Differences are mainly due to the ways the policy instruments are taken into account (explicit modeling or implicit modeling i.e. using ad-valorem equivalents). The aim of this paper is to assess empirically the impacts of recen...

The school finance reforms (SFRs) that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused some of the most dramatic changes in the structure of K–12 education spending in U.S. history. We analyze the effects of these reforms on the level and distribution of school district spending, as well as their effects on subsequent educational and economic outcomes. In Part One, using a newly co...

Institutional Development Charles E. Eesley 7-10-2009 "The storm center of the world has shifted . . . to China, whoever understands that mighty Empire . . . has a key to world politics for the next five hundred years." --U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, 1899 China is like a sleeping giant. And when she awakes, she shall astonish the world. --Napoleon Bonaparte, 1803 One of the greatest untold...

In Bulgaria’s irrigation sector, collective action solutions have been propagated by the Bulgarian Government and the World Bank in recent years. However, the introduction of a World Bank Project, the enforcement of the Bulgarian Water Law in 2000 and the Water User Association Act in 2001 find no common ground where collective action can grow. Given that villagers often hardly know anything ab...

The tools for policy evaluation and analysis reviewed in the preceding chapters are all ex-post, as they essentially compare the distribution of welfare over a population before and after a given policy or a given local program is implemented. While ex-post evaluation is essential for assessing the true impacts of existing policies and programs, there are many instances in which policymakers wo...

For decades, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic welfare and inhibit agricultural trade and economic growth. They almost certainly add to inequality and p...

Since health care markets are usually dictated by domestic and local policies, health care services in Japan are not so much affected by globalization at present. But in some countries, globalization has a great influence on their health care markets as medical tourism is becoming popular around the world. For example, some countries especially developing ones, can attract customers from develo...